Go ahead, buy a robot servant

Humanity has been waiting for robot servants ever since "The Jetsons" came out in the '60s. On a personal level, I've been waiting for them ever since I first saw "The Jetsons" reruns in the '90s.

As with an eerily large quantity of things today, sci-fi dreams of the past are becoming realities. Robots are already popular in businesses and hospitals (where they're saving lives by turning into mechanical bugs), but now a company dreams of putting them in homes. Israeli company Roboteam is producing 10,000 robots for home use and plans to open up pop-up shops in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.

“It’s all the Alexa things and Google Home together with all the video experience of FaceTime and WhatsApp – and with great mobility,” said Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Wolf, the company's cofounder. “It can move. It can talk. It can listen. It can understand you.”

Apparently, the robot will be 3 feet tall and weigh 22 pounds. It'll have an interactive display screen, sensors that let it move on its own, and a tray for carrying things. These robots are less "The Matrix" and more Rosie, the robot maid from "The Jetsons" (a show that, now that I'm really looking at it, hasn't aged well, despite taking place in the future).

"The opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employers," Rosie told George Jetson's boss. No word yet on if Roboteam's robots will also be sentient. If they are, then we're hoping they'll be just as sassy as Rosie ... and equally unlikely to take over the planet.

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Ilana Strauss
writes about social sciences and the environment because she is a person on a planet.